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Samuel Freedman:
Illuminating Intra-Jewish Friction
Lori Rotenberk -- 5/29/00
 | | Samuel Freedman |
To witness the split between Jews, Samuel Freedman says he didn't need to look any further than his own synagogue in New York City. What he read about clashes within Judaism in the international pages of the newspaper he saw with his own eyes within the families of friends and acquaintances. "It is impossible if you followed events in the Jewish world in the mid- and late 1990s to miss this tremendous upheaval going on," says Freedman, a former New York Times reporter and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. "It could be over who is and isn't a Jew or the vying between Zionist branches. I had become more observant myself, going regularly to the local synagogue, and I was rubbing up against people fighting battles in individual lives, over dietary laws, interfaith marriages or Torah readings at a bar mitzvah.''
Freedman's own inquiry into the roots of these divisions led to his new book, Jew vs. Jew: Inside the Civil Wars of American Jewry (Simon & Schuster, Aug.), an exploration of how the Jewish community has fractured in the past 40 years. Covering the period from 1960 to the present and focusing on communities in Florida, New England, California, Ohio and Colorado, as well as in Israel, Freedman concludes that the basis for the division is threefold. Rather than unifying American Jews, he believes Israel divides them both on religious and political issues. He also writes that no one has presented Jews "with a single enemy against whom to coalesce." And lastly, Jews have been so accepted in America that the intermarriage rate for American Jewry is 52%.
Simon & Schuster trade publicity director Victoria Meyer says she expects Jew vs. Jew to inspire lively debate in the Jewish press. S&S is promoting the book as "one of the first on the divisiveness and identity crises" among Jews. She adds, "It is not a polemic. It's nonjudgmental. Freedman explains the conflict in a way no one has done before." From September through mid-December, Freedman will tour to several major cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and San Diego. Meyer tells PW the tour will include appearances at many Jewish book fairs and that S&S will pair Freedman with Ari Goldman--also formerly a religion reporter for the New York Times and now on the faculty of Columbia's School of Journalism , and the author of Being Jewish (S&S, Sept.)--on a leg of the tour. First printing will be 40,000.
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